What type of disaster recovery plans should I expect/demand of my webhosts? Are there any that will go as far as to have mirrored servers?
d

You may be able to find some specialty hosting services that offer mirrored servers for a price, but that's not something that's normally done in a virtual hosting setting. It is common in a virtual hosting environment to use mirrored hard drives (RAID), which is not quite as good as mirrored servers but is still a big plus.

If uptime is important to you, I would be very careful and choose a host with a *reputation* for uptime and relability--not one that simply advertises it.

As Chris said, don't rely on your host. Most reputable hosts do regular backups of client data, however it is not usually guaranteed. In fact, most hosts will even tell you as much. A host's primary concern with data recovery is the server itself. There are also sevices available for remote backups, if you are really concerned with it.

-Dan

You should expect a second server if you expect to pay for it.

What you should expect, is that your data is backed up in case of hardware failure. But don't expect to get free access to this backup should you need it for anything else.

That's what you should demand. Anything more than that for free, and you should be happy.

I'd go with a host that backed up every day, instead of every week, as hardware failure does happen. Of course I'd trust the host that restored files for free even more, because you can actually test this process and be sure that there really are backups being performed.

Just my $0.02.